Fuses & Components

When a fuse box, relay or any other part of your vehicle stops working, you have to replace it as soon as you can. To do this, you want to know you have access to the right replacement parts, so CARiD has everything you need for every vehicle in your garage, which eliminates the stress of trying to find the right part, and makes your maintenance schedule a lot easier than it otherwise would be!

The fuse box contains a number of relays inside it, and these relays are used to regulate the flow of electricity reaching the radio and other components from the battery and alternator. While the relays prevent damage to components from shocks or jolts, and enable them to keep running, your fuse box prevents damage to the relays from all sorts of common problems like vibrations, moisture and others.

The fuse box is almost always found underneath the hood, in the top right corner, but you may need to consult your vehicle's handbook if you cannot find it there. It will be a box, usually made of a particular type of plastic, and will have clips on both sides or at either end, which you will need to undo if you want to open the box. The relays inside are small, and you can usually determine which relay runs which component by looking at the diagram that can be found underneath the lid of the fuse box.

When you look at your fuse box, it becomes immediately obvious that it is not going to live forever, because it sits inside a hot, dirty engine bay. It is designed to protect the relays from the vibrations, heat and moisture found within that bay, but it is not ageless and it will eventually stop providing as much protection to the relays. When this happens, the relays will 'pop,' or break completely, which means they will stop sending electricity through to your components, and this is going to be immediately noticeable.

It is going to be immediately noticeable because when a relay stops working, so does the component it is sending power to. When your radio stops working, your phone stops charging, you lose lights on your dashboard, or almost anything else goes wrong, you can look to the fuse box or the relay as a possible problem. While the problem will usually be that the relay has reached the end of its life, there may come a time where the entire fuse box will need to be replaced because it is failing to protect more than one relay.